Fixing up plots

This week I’ve been updating some of the plots from the early days of GearHead development. Many of them have serious problems- they don’t scale difficulty to renown properly, lack email or memos, and deal poorly when the player character goes off-script. The easiest way to update missions, or at least the way that will probably introduce the fewest new bugs, is to simply copy over the dialogue text from the old plot into an up-to-date plot template.

Unfortunately, not all plots are simple missions. The “BusinessDeal” plot is a mess, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever encountered it while playing. Similarly, the kidnapping story is riddled with bugs and I’m not sure there’s any good way to set it right. I may end up disabling some of these plots until such a time as they can be rewritten.

The picture above is from the story Hey Greenbot! in Alien Lives. If you’d like to help me out as I prepare to finish my graduate studies, it’s available at the Polar Bear Comix webstore in cbz format.